A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  “No, he definitely said Wednesday or Friday.”

  “Maybe we made a mistake,” Olga said. “I have a free slot Wednesday morning, if that works for him.”

  “Well, when do you have him?”

  “I don’t have him till September.”

  “You know what, just leave him there. I’ll explain it to him. No, he should remember these things. I bought him a little notebook for his birthday expressly for this purpose, and do you think he’s opened it?”

  She laughed. “Go easy on your elders! It’s only been two weeks since his birthday!”

  “Yes, of course,” Slava said, cursing himself for the unnecessary arabesque. “I forget he’s an old man sometimes. You know how it is—you don’t want them to get old. Anyway, Olya, just one last thing. He said last time the ambulette was waiting for him a block up? Can you tell me if you have the right address?”

  “I have 2070 Quentin Road, is that wrong?”

  “No, that’s right. I don’t know why the driver was on the wrong block.”

  “We’ve got someone else at 2130, maybe there was a mix-up. I’ll check.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Just a mix-up. You know, he worries for no reason, that man. I’ll tell him to cool it.”

  She laughed again. “All right. If only all grandsons were this concerned! Come visit us sometime with Grandpa, okay?”

  “I am like the Master here,” Israel said with a belch, pointing to the living room window, which cleared the pavement by a dozen inches. A pair of feet clicked past, adding to the thin mist of dust on the glass. “Master and Margarita. You’ve read it?”

  Slava nodded. “In class.”

  “I’m rereading Gogol,” Israel said. “‘Whither art thou soaring, Russia?’ He knew where they were soaring. Right into the shit bucket.” Israel turned back toward the window. “You can tell people’s moods by the way they walk,” he observed. They watched a lame leg make its dragging passage. “His mood is, ‘I want my old leg back,’” Israel said, and broke into hoarse laughter. He coughed brutally into his fist, the bristle of his eyebrows trembling and leaping. “When you have only a little thread,” he announced grandly after recovering, “you have to know how to make a whole blanket from it.” He placed his hands on his hips, as if about to start calisthenics. “As I said, I do a little writing, too.” He coughed again. “My throat is a desert, I’m sorry. Sit, sit, don’t stand like an inspector.” He motioned to the sofa, its suede haunches cinched by plastic gold bands. “One writer to another, I want to say: I admire the way you work.”

  “Meaning?” Slava said, falling into the sofa.

  “You don’t need me to invent the story,” he said. “For the claim form, I mean. But here you are. You wanted to sniff around.” Israel wiggled his nose. “Texture, you wanted.”

  “Where’s your family, Israel Arkadievich?” Slava said.

  “You can call me Israel,” he said. “We are in America now, you can be informal. Back home, you can save someone from drowning and you won’t get a thank-you, but they’ll always call you Israel Arkadievich. Here, it’s that hai-hava-yoo all the time, but they won’t save you if you’re drowning. Am I correct?”

  “I guess you are,” Slava said, thinking about it.

  “My wife is dead eighteen months,” he said. “May the earth be like down for her. I’m sure you can tell.” His gnarly fingers swept the room. “‘The frying pan is not sizzling and the kettle is not whistling,’ as we used to say.”

  “I’m sorry,” Slava said. “I didn’t know.”

  “My son . . .” He indicated the window sadly, as if the son were standing outside it. “A couple of years after we came, Yuri got mixed up with those blackhats. They organized the whole world for him over at that synagogue. He stopped eating in our kitchen, put on that hat. My wife was still alive to see it, I regret that she was. And then . . . poof—he left. He’s in Israel now.” Israel stuck out his tongue. “They have these curls down to their shoulders like two swinging pricks, excuse me. How do they get those things to curl like that? Curling iron? Vain bastards.” He nearly spat, then remembered it was his living room. “Look.” He rummaged in a tin eating bowl on the bookshelf until he held a worn-out square.

  Slava unfolded the photograph with his fingertips, the paper as frayed as a dry leaf. On the back, in a smudged violet cursive, it said: “Yuri—too late.” From the front smiled a young, round face wispy with a month’s beard, the grin toothy and guileless. The teeth had not enjoyed the correction of braces. Already their owner was wearing the costume of the pious. A black suit jacket, specks of dandruff visible despite the mediocre quality of the photo, over a white shirt with a drooping collar, underneath it a white tee with tumbleweeds of chest hair rising above the neckline. Behind him were ponderous burgundy drapes that could have belonged only to a Russian banquet hall in Israel’s neighborhood.

  “Why did you rename yourself?” Slava said.

  “It’s not Israel’s fault,” he said. “There aren’t enough of these blackhats over here? Besides, I changed it before any of this started, right when we came. I wanted to show my support. Who’s Iosif? Iosif was me in the USSR. That person is finished.”

  “It’s nice to meet someone who knew my grandfather when he was young,” Slava said.

  “Now there’s a story,” Israel said.

  “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “That’s a load. He would tell a horse how to trot.”

  “Then I don’t believe what he says,” Slava said.

  Israel smirked. “Why would you believe what I say?”

  “If you lie, I won’t write the application for you.”

  He laughed. “Very good! You are becoming clever. It runs in your family.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I meant no offense,” Israel said.

  “But meaning what.”

  “Meaning what.” Israel leaned forward. “Do you know how your grandfather got that home nurse of his?” He clapped once per name: “Marina. Berta. Olga. They change all the time.

  “Your grandmother—may the earth be like down for her—had twelve hours of nurse care a day from the city. That’s a lot, by the way. You’ve got these American grandmothers wandering around, bags of bones, they paid in to the tax base for fifty years, and they don’t have any help. It breaks your heart to see these people. I feel like a pole jumper next to them.

  “Anyway, your grandfather decides twelve a day’s not enough. He wants your grandmother to have someone around the clock. So he gives the twelve-hour nurse some money and tells her to call the agency to ask for an extension on the hours. ‘The husband’s gone bad from helping take care of the wife,’ she says. ‘They need someone full-time.’

  “So the assessor comes from the city. All this is from your grandfather’s lips, by the way, because he’s a braggart. The assessor comes and your grandfather is sitting there like a vegetable. Drooling, head keeled over like it’s not connected to the rest of him. The assessor starts calling to him—‘Yevgeny, Yevgeny’—so your grandfather starts grunting and gnashing his teeth. He acted out the whole thing in front of me at Korolenko’s office. Minus the bowel-loosening. Your grandfather should have moved to Hollywood.”

  “And they got twenty-four hours,” Slava said. “Berta.”

  “You know who gets twenty-four hours, typically?” Israel said. “Quadriplegics, war veterans, and psychotics. But he wanted it for your grandmother, and he got it. Your grandfather gets things.”

  “He got me,” Slava said. Through the little window, the light was beginning to steal out of the sky.

  “You are too smart for that,” Israel said.

  “Don’t be sure,” Slava said.

  “I’ve known him sixty years,” Israel said. “‘A child of other people’s gardens,’ they called him. He got what needed to be got. The salami, the caviar, the cognac, the minks. Nobody had access to those things but Party people with special privileges. Even I can’t tell you how
he—a barber—got what he got. Do you know how wealthy your family was at home? In secret, but still. Not everyone had the stomach for it. How many people did he keep in Climat perfume, bananas, free trips to Crimea, so their mouths would stay closed about what he got for himself, your grandmother, your mama, you? I saw him on the street one time. It was hotter than a furnace outside, and he’s wearing an overcoat. It looked like he had a piglet in there. I said, ‘Zhenya, what’s with the coat?’”

  “He had something stuffed in there,” Slava said.

  “Fifteen sticks of salami taped to the insides!” Israel sniggered. “Like rocket launchers! That salami was so fresh it could talk. You understand if you got stopped with fifteen sticks of salami? That’s ‘intent to sell,’ ‘private enterprise,’ prison.

  “One salami went to the woman in ticketing at the Aeroflot office on Karl Marx Street. One went to the director of the kindergarten where your little mama was enrolled. One went to the pediatrician at the local clinic, so your mama wouldn’t have to wait three days for a house call if God forbid she got ill. You watched him with awe. My hand never rose to try something similar.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not. I don’t know. Just the way you’re made, I guess.” Israel coughed into his sleeve. Slava rose and got him a glass of water. The washer was missing from the faucet, and water sprayed all over the countertop. Slava wiped it up with a towel.

  “I envied him,” Israel said when Slava returned. He lapped greedily at the glass. “Oh, this is good. Thank you. After the war, you’d be at a restaurant with a girl, and these drunk zhloby would stumble over: ‘Look at these kikes feasting away!’ And you have to hang your head because you don’t want trouble, because there’s a million more where they came from. But you’re scalding inside, because until then maybe you were trying to impress the girl.

  “But your grandfather, he never just sat there. He got up and he beat that zhlob to a pulp, right then and there, while everyone watched, even police. Everybody got stiff when Zhenya Gelman walked into a restaurant.”

  Israel drained his glass and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. “During the war, there were seven attempted outbreaks from ghettos by Jews,” he said. “Ask me how many times Soviet soldiers tried to break out of German POW camps? Find me enough for one hand. But it was always ‘“Fought” in Uzbekistan, did you, kike?’ Because the war never came to Uzbekistan. At the end of the war, there were more than a hundred, maybe two hundred, Jews decorated Heroes of the USSR, and you can imagine how many more there would have been if that prick Stalin wasn’t an anti-Semite. I mean, you had Jewish war veterans without legs. But the way people looked at you, it’s as if they thought you amputated them yourself to make it look like you’d fought.”

  “Were you in Uzbekistan during the war?” Slava said.

  “I was getting shrapnel in my leg under Kharkov,” Israel said. He gave Slava a little ballet step and hiked up his gym trouser, revealing a veiny, pockmarked calf. “I could use a new leg, too.”

  “Well, your fearless Yevgeny Gelman was in Uzbekistan,” Slava said.

  “I’m too old for grudges, Slava,” Israel waved. “It kills me more than the other person.”

  Slava sighed. “I should start heading back soon,” he said. “It’s a long way.”

  “I was going to make some dinner for us,” Israel said. “Microwave, but not bad.”

  “Next time,” Slava said.

  “I’ve never been to Manhattan,” Israel said. “I would like to sometime. All those lights. They show it on television. Can you sleep, with all those lights?”

  “You said what I wrote needs an improvement,” Slava said.

  “Oh, it’s good, Slava,” he nodded. “It’s got that silence of ours. That terrible Russian silence that the Americans don’t understand. They are always making noise because they need to forget life is going to end. But we remember, and so we have silence, even when we’re shouting and laughing.”

  “So?” Slava said. “You want silence, I’ll give you silence.”

  “But think about it, Slava,” Israel said, clucking his tongue. “You’re Fritz Fritzovich reviewing these claims, may all those people get covered up to their heads. And you get this application. Where was the individual between 1939 and 1945. And you get this . . . this . . . Adolf is going to believe that an eighty-year-old man, an immigrant fart, wrote what you wrote?”

  “He could have had his grandson translate it for him,” Slava said tightly. “That’s not unimaginable. The English is the grandson’s and the grandson is fluent. Doesn’t mean the story has to be false.”

  “The grandson is fluent, all right,” Israel said. “But the story. You’re trying to avoid detection or what? It’s like a puppet theater, you know? What do they call it? Not puppet theater—with the marionettes.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’ve got this movie scene. Beautiful moment, beautifully written, the cows. But no beginning, no middle, no end. Who are we, where did we live? Look at some books. The Minsk ghetto was formed on such-and-such date. We lived at such-and-such address from this date to this date. This is where we were moved when they put up the wire. And then you can do your beautiful sentences. But you need more than that. Nice sentences is like a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how to cook. It’s not your story. Forget about yourself for a moment.”

  “And where am I supposed to put all that silence of yours in this encyclopedia version?” Slava said.

  “Oh, but that’s for you to figure out!” Israel giggled.

  “A fact can’t be wrong if it isn’t a fact,” Slava said expertly. “You start feeding numbers and dates in there, they’re going to get their record books out. That’s how they check facts, Israel. I have it on good authority.”

  “You’ll know what to do.”

  “Why don’t you write it,” Slava said. “I’ll translate. That’s the solution.”

  “No, no,” Israel said, waving him away. “Don’t get puffy. Listen, you can’t teach an old Jew how to make money. I’ll tell you a joke, and then you can go to your Manhattan. Two guys are panhandling on a street in Moscow. One has a sign that says: ‘I’m Ivanov,’ in other words a Slav. ‘Please help a poor beggar.’ The other’s sign says, ‘I’m Abramov,’ in other words a Jew. ‘Please help a poor beggar.’ And whoever walks by, they give money only to Ivanov, more and more. It’s like they’re giving money to Ivanov just to stick it to Abramov. Finally, a Jewish guy comes up to Abramov and says, ‘Abramov, what’s wrong with you? Change your sign to a Slav name!’ At which point Abramov turns to Ivanov and says, ‘Look, Moshe, this schmuck is teaching me how to make money.’” Israel quaked with laughter. “What those shvartzes pull in the subway? ‘I lost my job and I’m trying to get back on my feet’? Pathetic! An old Russian man could run ten circles around them.”

  “I think you underestimate your black-market skills,” Slava said.

  “Even a legless man knows how to run when he needs to,” Israel said, shrugging. “We’re all graduates of that particular academy. But it’s too late for some of us. I’m interested in what happens to you, however.”

  “I am going to be arrested for forging restitution claims for my grandfathers,” Slava said.

  “No need to say it so loudly like that,” Israel said, glancing at the window.

  “I’ll be going,” Slava said.

  “For your information,” Israel said, peering at him—he was shorter than Slava, but his gaze was strong—“I have no illusions why he mentioned the letter to me. He gives not to give but to show you he gives. Look, it’s a kind of compliment to owe something to Yevgeny Gelman, for a man like that to think you can give him something of use—I can barely take three breaths without coughing. But Slava, don’t pretend you are doing this to be a good grandson.”

  “Don’t pretend you’re a writer,” Slava said.

  “Opa!” Israel said. “You may be your grandfather’s grandson, but you are also your
grandmother’s grandson. She was the fierce one. That’s the nice thing about having children. They take the best of you both. Two for the price of one.”

  “You get your letter, and I get to be with my grandmother for a thousand words,” Slava said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I see. That’s nice.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be under your name.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You should be,” Slava said. “We’re committing fraud. International fraud, apparently. I know that means nothing to any of you.”

  “We are always behind you, Gogol,” Israel said. He clapped Slava’s arm. “Have a safe trip.”

  As Slava walked out, he wondered how Israel had meant it. Behind Slava in defense or behind Slava, hiding.

  On his way to the subway, Slava found himself looking around casually—was anyone interested in his progress? The day’s last light was leaking away, so it was hard to tell. The street crawled with the usual suspects, grandmothers with mesh bags, a bowlegged Mexican, a cop chewing gum, everyone moving, no one stopping because he stopped. Slava felt resentful relief.

  On the train home, Slava went over the details of their conversation—visions of swinging pricks, quadriplegics, Kharkov, and shrapnel sieved through his mind, refusing to snag on some brain branch and bloom—but all of it was either irrelevant or too broad for a claim letter. What had happened to Grandmother after the close call with the Germans? More forest wandering? No, that wasn’t the right direction. Overly similar narratives—Slava was sure that was a red flag.

  It had been bothering him since that first night. He hadn’t gotten Grandmother right in Grandfather’s story. Israel was right that improvements could be made, but he was wrong about which. In Grandfather’s letter, Slava had described Grandmother’s actions, but he hadn’t described her. What was she like? He couldn’t find out through a scene before or after the war, because that wouldn’t qualify. And it was hard enough to conjure her as a fifteen-year-old waif without having to disguise her as a boy.

  He had three stations before he would go underground. He sighed and dialed Grandfather.